Friday, August 12, 2011

Three ways to format your disk drive partition in Windows

Here are three ways to clean up or format your hard disk drive on windows machine.

1. Simple format- The first and the most easy way to format a drive is to just open my computer on Xp or computer on Vista/7 and right click on the drive you want to format and click on the option Format in the dropdown menu (if the drive you want to format has the windows installation or any system information the format option will not be available and it will be disabled in the dropdown ).
Now a pop up window will appear with the options to format the drive, it is recommended to go with the default but you can customize it, but make sure the format type is NTFS, as Microsoft uses it as its default and most preferred drive format. So this is it with the first format, good luck and be careful with your data.

2. Advanced Format- In this advanced method to format the drive just right click on Computer or My computer, a drop down menu will appear and select manage, a new window will open with lots of options but don't worry it is easy to do the next few steps. Now on the left navigation panel click on the disk management and wait for the system to load the information about the drive partition. Here you will see the colored box view of the partitions in your drive with some detailed information. Select the drive box you want to format and right click, in the drop down menu select format and the window will start formatting and status will appear "Formatting" and it might take few minutes to complete the formatting. As the status changes without any error, your format is finished and you are all done, but be careful about the data.

3. Pro and safe way to format your drive- Well the options above doesn't allow you to format system drives with windows installations or any other system files. This method will allow you to format any drive in the system. For this you need a bootable disk it is recommended you have windows XP/Vista/7 bootable disk. Insert the disk then start or restart your system, boot from the cd/dvd and continue with the installation process until you are asked to select the drive. Now be confident and sure about the drive you want to format and follow the instructions on screen to format the drive if you are using XP, or if you are using Vista/7 then it's more easy with the simple user interface, just select the drive and click on format in the lower panel. After it's formatted exit the setup if you don't want to install the OS and make sure that you haven't formatted the drive with boot files.

So here were the three ways to format the your hard disk partitions, but always be careful about your data and be sure about which drive you are formatting, and sometimes somethings might go wrong so better back up your important data.